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The Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) used videos of the 2002 Gujarat riots to "motivate" David Headley to carry out jihad against India, it has been revealed.

Headley, a co-accused in the 26/11 strike, was allegedly trained by the LeT as well as the ISI in terror operations after seeing the videos "that revealed the persecution of Muslims in India".

As a star witness during the just-concluded trial of his childhood friend Tahawwur Rana, Headley told a US court in Chicago how the banned Pakistani militant group was using the 2002 riots as a potent tool to radicalise possible recruits.

Headley told the Chicago court last month that the Gujarat riots were very often the topic of discussion among him and his Pakistani handlers, including Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi as well as senior LeT leaders such as Sajid Mir and Yusuf Muzammil.

When the US government prosecutor asked him if the Gujarat riot motivated him to carry out jihad against India, Headley said: "Yes."

"It was a massacre that had happened, and they showed people running, houses being burnt. And also since that time from 2002 till 2007, the Lashkar office itself had received hundreds of letters from Muslims in Gujarat asking for help," Headley said.

"All of us spent a few weeks there watching videos of different actions that had taken place in India against Muslims," Headley, 50, said. He saw the videos at the outfit's Muzzaffarabad headquarters.

He told the court of having seen a hidden-camera interview of one Baba Bajrangi, said to be a VHP leader, who relocated himself from Mumbai to Gujarat during the riots.

"In the video, Baba Bajrangi claimed that he had killed a lot of women and burnt houses and stuff. That's available on YouTube," Headley said referringto his conversation with LeT leaders in Pakistan.

"They are videos of the massacres that had taken place in Gujarat a few years earlier and the breaking of the Babri Mosque, other things like that," Headley said when asked about the videos that were shown to him by the Lashkar leaders ahead of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack.

The terror accused also revealed how his handlers used a US cell phone number to communicate with him in order to deceive Indian security agencies.

He said the ISI's Major Iqbal - another accused - used to call him from an American number while the Pakistani-American was scouting for targets in India.

Headley told the court that Iqbal gave him a New York cell phone number starting with 646 so that both of them could have unhindered communication while he was in India.

Headley said he was asked to call on that number to talk to Major Iqbal when he was travelling inside India.

"This was done because all calls between India and Pakistan were mostly monitored," Headley explained.